1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a word processor for processing a text.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a prior art apparatus capable of serially entering characters in a frame such as an area of 15 lines with each line including 20 characters, when it is desire to input a character outside of the frame, it is necessary to position a cursor outside of the frame or to release the frame.
In addition, when a character is overwritten or inserted in the frame area, it may be written outside of the frame. A word processor devised on behalf of the assignee of the present invention has a function of automatically expanding the frame during word processing for the framed area (See Japanese Patent Application No. 54-127203). However, in the proposed word processor, the frame is defined line by line and the effect of the expansion of the frame to other frames is limited to the immediately following line. Therefore, the process is simple.
It has been known to define a frame having a predetermined size and to input characters in the frame. An example thereof is a column of a newspaper. A word processor proposed by the assignee of the present invention enables word processing for the framed area to include modification of the fixed frame. (See Japanese Patent Application No. 54-127203). The proposed word processor, however, is characterized by a restriction that a longitudinal dimension of one frame must be equal to that of the laterally adjacent frame, because flags or registers, one for each line, are used to recognize and discriminate the frame and hence the frames must be delimited for each line.
When an edit process such as deletion is done for an entered character string, it may be necessary to delete one line. For example, when a carriage return (CR) code in the character string is deleted, it is necessary to feed forward the succeeding lines by one line. When a selected full line is deleted, the same process is required. In a word processor capable of setting a plurality of frames on an image screen or a sheet in a desired form and processing character strings within the frames, relative relations among the frames may not be satisfied by the process of deleting more lines or of feeding lines forward line feed process. For example, when a line in a frame is to be deleted or fed forward, the process is different depending on whether or not a character is present is the other frame.
In preparing a formatted document, a plurality of frames are set in an image screen or a sheet and characters are entered in the frames and edited. In a prior art frame processing, a single frame is set in a line or a fixed frame is set like a newspaper but it is not possible to change the sizes of a plurality of frames or define a new frame at a central area.
In a known apparatus, rules are partially patterned so that they can be handled equally with the characters in order for document data including rules to be prepared and provided to a printer. However, in order to prepare the data for series of rule patterns, a plurality of input means corresponding to the number of partial patterns are required, or it is necessary to specify a start point and end point of the rule and convert them to the series of partial pattern data. Furthermore, in the known apparatus, the relation between the rule and the document is not always constant and the relation between the document and the rule is destroyed when correction such as insertion or deletion is made to the document.